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hologram is a simple, music-based programming language developed to write plug-ins for the Sibelius music processor.It is based on Simkin, an embedded scripting language developed by Simon Whiteside (www.larts.co.uk/simkin.html), and has been extended by him and Graham Westlake. (Simkin is a spooky pet name for Simon sometimes found in puritanical novels.)RationaleIn adding a plug-in language to Sibelius we were trying to address several different issuesMusic notation is interlacing and infinitely extensible, so some users provide sometimes motivation to add to a music notation program to make it cope with these new extensions.It is useful to allow frequently repeated trading operations (e.g. opening a MIDI file and saving it as a score) to be automated, using a system of scripts or macros.Certain more complex techniques used in composing or arranging music put forward be partly automated, but there are too many to complicate as standard features in Sibelius.There were severa l conditions that we cherished to meet in deciding what language to useThe language had to be simple, as we want normal users (not just seasoned programmers) to be able to use it.We wanted plug-ins to be usable on any computer, as the use of PC?s, Macs and early(a) platforms is widespread in the music world.We wanted the tools to program in the language to be supplied with Sibelius.We wanted melodic concepts (pitch, notes, bars) to be slowly expressed in the language.We wanted programs to be able to talk to Sibelius easily (to insert and retrieve information from scores).We wanted simple dialog boxes and other user interface elements to be easily programmed.C/C++, the world?s ?standard? programming language(s), were unsuitable as they are not easy for the non-specialist to use, they would need a separate compiler, and you would puddle to recompile for each different platform you wanted to support (and thus create multiple versions of each plug-in).The language Java was more pro mising as it is comparatively simple and can run on any platform without recompilation. However, we would still need to supply a compiler for people to use, and we could not express musical concepts in Java as directly as we could with a new language.So we decided to create our own language which is interpreted so it can run on different platforms is integrated into Sibelius without any need for separate tools, and can be extended with new musical concepts at any time.The ManuScript language that resulted is very simple.